Category Archives: labor

The Opportunity Cost of Not Working

The great conductor Carlos Kleiber was not a man to worry about the opportunity cost of not working: He refuses to be at the beck and call of the record industry or the opera and concert managements who bombard him … Continue reading

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You Just Can’t Find the Skilled Blue-Collar Workers These Days

When it comes to reasons for electricity prices going through the roof, the inability of your local utility company to find qualified line technicians is not going to be very high up the list. But when it comes to the … Continue reading

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Short Sharp Strike

What is it with these super-short UAW strikes? The one at GM lasted only two days, while the one at Chrysler lasted about six hours. Is it a way for the UAW negotiators to concede gracefully while appearing tough to … Continue reading

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Could the UAW buy GM?

As part of the GM-UAW settlement, GM is paying $29.9 billion upfront into an animal called a VEBA, or Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association. It will also add somewhere between $5.4 billion and $7 billion more to that VEBA down the … Continue reading

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Who Won in the GM Strike

Andrew Leonard asks today whether anybody won in the showdown between GM and the UAW. "There’s no triumph in this deal," he concludes. "Just resignation." I’m slightly more optimistic, and I’d say that both sides won. After all, a strike … Continue reading

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Why the GM Strike Makes Sense

The GM strike makes sense to me. The key issue for the union, quite properly, is the jobs of its members. The last time the UAW went on national strike, in 1970, it had 400,000 members; now, it has 73,000. … Continue reading

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Getting Behind Today’s Employment Report

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism submits: Those who have been following the job creation story weren’t surprised at the weak BLS employment (the so-called “non-farm payroll”) report today, or by the fact that it revised the results for the last … Continue reading

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Dispelling the Myth of Low Unemployment

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism submits: Doing some weekend catch-up, and a reader pointed me to a very good post by Barry Ritholtz, which confirms something I’ve believed but haven’t gone to the trouble to prove, namely, that unemployment is … Continue reading

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Lawyers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Save but Your Jobs!

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism submits: A Bloomberg story reports that large corporate law firms such as Kirkland & Ellis and Jones Day are facing not merely pressure, but explicit client demands, to send junior level work overseas. This is … Continue reading

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Mexico Immigration Datapoints of the Day

Two intriguing
datapoints
from YouNotSneaky today.
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Paper of the Day: Levy and Temin on Income Inequality

Robert
Samuelson
devoted his column yesterday to a very interesting new paper from
Frank Levy and Peter Temin of MIT. For those
of us who prefer to read original papers rather than the journalism based on
them, the paper can be found here.
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New Union to Have 3.4 Million Members

The biggest task facing a new union will be to help manage globalization and bring its benefits to labor around the world, rather than to rail against it in a knee-jerk manner.
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